The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  But Paul had been working with that Payne dude, and Payne was pretty damn cold.

  They ate eggs while they waited for Li’l Deets to call them back.

  “I got your damn info,” Li’l Deets snapped. “It’s fuckin’ Cournoyer. Word on the street is he’s moving to get his own ’mancy. Some massive hit’s going down this afternoon. Half his boys are in the hospital, the other piled into a van headed to upstate New York. Now will you tell me what the hell is happening?”

  “They’re gonna kill our ’mancer.” Quaysean hung up again.

  K-Dash was first into the bathroom, but they both piled into the stall together. K-Dash got out the salt shaker of Flex they had left, snorted a pinch – all they needed to locate Paul, according to the letter of Paul’s contract. Paul had intended for only Oscar to find him, but realistically anyone with a snootful of Paul’s contractually restricted Flex could track him down.

  K-Dash’s eyes glowed, literally glowed, in a way that Quaysean found quite arousing. “He’s in upstate New York, all right.”

  “His phone’s going right to voicemail.”

  “No signal out there.”

  They pondered their options. Paul wasn’t critical to Oscar’s operations; he was significant juice, no doubt, saving Oscar’s men from accidents that might lead to drug busts, but they’d gotten by without Flex before and could do so again.

  Slightly more troublesome was what their place in the new organization would be. They’d already pissed off Li’l Deets. But if they dropped everything, went back to conference with Deets, they’d be fine.

  But Paul was a friend.

  “He has a daughter,” K-Dash said, concerned.

  “And Valentine.”

  “Maybe Valentine’s gone already. Payne didn’t like her. I think this is Payne pulling up stakes. He really didn’t like us being involved.”

  “So Payne gets Oscar’s biggest enemy to put a hit on Paul.”

  “Who sucks at guns.”

  “And is miles away from help.”

  “And then Payne gets to blame Paul’s death and ours on a rival gang, which probably plays pretty well in his organization.”

  Quaysean already knew what they would do, foolish as it was, as one of many reasons he loved K-Dash was K-Dash’s irrational loyalty. Few men had watched K-Dash and Quaysean kiss, and Quaysean doubted that Paul knew what an honor that was to witness their affection, but that didn’t fucking matter.

  “He’s hours away,” Quaysean objected. “Even if we drove top speed, we’d never get there in time.”

  K-Dash flipped through his notepad, the one that held the contract Paul had signed to activate his Flex. He tapped the words.

  The party of the first part would like authorization to use your Flex to speed like a madman… on a wild, nonfatal drive through New York.

  “I love you,” Quaysean said.

  They kissed. K-Dash’s tongue vibrated with the electric tang of ’mancy.

  Forty-One

  The Second Thing That Goes Wrong For the King

  Mr Payne was right about one thing, Paul thought. This sure is a boring drive.

  He’d cranked up his best 1990s hip-hop, but the scenery was tedious: a lone highway snaking among forest-covered mountains. The exits held paltry little places, towns too small for even a Denny’s to survive; just a diner of uncertain origins and a grubby gas station that closed at nine in the evening.

  Paul consulted his notes to find the proper exit; the mountains were so high, his GPS was dead weight here. The roads eroded from asphalt into pebbled dirt, curving around deep woods to deposit Paul at his destination:

  Mr Payne’s drug laboratory.

  It didn’t look like a drug lab, but then again Paul had enough experience to know that Flex labs that looked like drug labs got busted quick. This shuttered-down gas station would have been antiquated in the 1960s – back in the days when selling candy bars was advanced marketing, and no self-respecting gas station wouldn’t change your oil and fill your tires. There was a bay big enough for one car to pull into – or would have been, if it hadn’t been tacked over with plywood.

  It was an absurd place for a gas station, but Payne had never intended for it to be successful as a gas station.

  Paul pulled around the two holes out front where the pumps had once been, parking the car in the back. A sturdy door was locked with three separate padlocks, to keep the local kids out of mischief.

  Paul unlocked them, feeling desolation.

  He clicked on the lightswitch – fluorescents flickered on. He’d entered by the cash register area, where once someone had rung up gas sales – a tiny alcove barely big enough for five or six people to wait in line, assuming five or six people had ever gathered here simultaneously.

  There was a thick hardwood counter the cashier had once stood behind – a solid chunk of rain-darkened maple. Paul had little doubt the original owner had built it himself, and would have been proud to see it survive all these years.

  Probably would have been saddened by the plywood over the broken windows, though.

  Paul walked through the swinging door to the garage, seeing the usual accoutrements installed by Payne’s handymen – the desk with fresh legal pads, the alembics, the hematite.

  What he did not expect to see was his daughter, crying.

  “…Aliyah?” He scooped her up in a hug. She grabbed him tight, crying harder; his entrance had triggered a cascade of emotions.

  She crawled with flux. She must have gained it fast-travelling here – and that weighty flux-load indicated she felt guilty about coming here, so guilty the universe amplified her self-hatred. Despite that, her bad luck had yet to cause the roof to collapse on her head, which made Paul happy; Rainbird, creepy Rainbird, had taught her to control her flux.

  “Malik Reles,” she said. “Look him up.”

  “What?”

  “Malik Reles, Daddy! You can find anyone! You have to find him and see if he’s OK!”

  “Sweetie, I... I’m about to brew some Flex. I can’t afford any bad luck going into this. Can it wait for later?”

  “I need to know!”

  Paul suppressed a groan. Aliyah was so wound up, the only way to calm her down would be concession. And while he usually drew firm lines whenever Aliyah threw a tantrum, maybe telling her what she asked for might reveal the cause of her concern.

  He unpacked a fresh Bic pen from the stockpile, scrawled requests for information on a legal pad.

  “Does he live in New York, sweetie?”

  “I think so.”

  Fortunately, it was a fairly unique name, so Paul could narrow his requests down. He whistled with relief when the legal pad morphed into a hospital record, not a death certificate.

  “He’s not OK,” Paul grimaced. “Records say he fell off a dock. He broke his skull, and has internal bleeding. They’ve…” Paul tried to think of a better way to put it, but Aliyah would know if he lied. “They’ve put in an induced coma – a super-sleep – while they try to figure out how to fix him.”

  Her cheeks were raw with tears. “Will they?”

  “Honey, I’m a bureaucromancer, not a doctor. And the doctors don’t know. Though the prognosis, it’s… it’s not good.” He sat her on the desk, wiped her nose with his handkerchief. “Now. Why?”

  Aliyah cried into her hands.

  “Aliyah.” Paul tried to sound reassuring. “It’s OK.”

  Her sniffles stopped. She hitched in a deep, shuddering breath, like she was about to jump off the diving board for the first time, squeezing her eyes shut. Then she opened them, staring earnestly at Paul:

  “Do you think I should have killed Anathema?”

  It’s finally coming out, Paul thought, glancing at the bag of hematite. I wouldn’t have chosen today to lance this wound, but… this is good.

  “Sweetie.” Paul took her hands in his. “You didn’t have any choice.”

  Her forehead furrowed in frustration. “But should I have killed her?�
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  “If there was another way for you to stop Anathema, you would have done it. She was... she liked hurting people. She thought killing was how people proved they were better than other people. And you didn’t even know you had ’mancy then. I don’t think you could... I don’t think you had a better way, sweetie.”

  She punched him in the chest, furious. “That’s not what I’m asking!”

  “What, you want to know whether – whether I thought Anathema deserved to die?”

  “Yes!” she said, exasperated.

  “Nobody deserves to die, sweetie.”

  “She did. She hurt people. You said she liked it. And she... she made it so the only way I could stop her from stabbing you was to kill her. You said so! So she deserved it.”

  Paul shook his head. “Sweetie, it’s… maybe we have to kill sometimes. But killing, it… it hurts our heart. You know that. You feel bad, don’t you?”

  She slammed her fists against her knees. “No.”

  “So if you don’t feel bad, what do you feel?”

  “I’m mad at you!”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you tell me killing is wrong! You tell me it’s what bad people do! And then you don’t kill anyone, and they come back again and again with bigger guns, and you make it so other people have to hurt people to protect you!”

  She couldn’t breathe fast enough to keep up with her anger. Paul reached out to hug her; she slapped him away. But when he backed away to give her more space, Aliyah clasped his hand to her face, rubbing her cheek against his palm.

  “And I liked it,” she whispered. “I liked hurting people. Except now maybe I don’t and you’re making me hurt them to save you and that makes you a bad man, Daddy, you’re a bad man…”

  What the hell did Aliyah do? Paul wondered.

  Tires crunched on the gravel outside.

  “And nobody loved Anathema!” She flailed at him. “Nobody’s going to love me because you made me hurt people, and I’m just as bad as her, I’m just as bad as her…”

  The tires could wait a moment. As could the people getting out of the cars outside. He grabbed her hands.

  “You listen here, sweetie,” he told her. “I will always love you. You know why you’re not bad as her? Because you want to be good. And even if you were as bad as her, you are my daughter and I will never ever leave you.”

  That’s when the bullets ripped through the plywood window, smashing into Paul’s skull.

  Forty-Two

  Aliyah’s Auto-Save

  Gunfire meant “videogames” to Aliyah.

  That saved her father.

  If ’mancy had been a spell she activated, then the bullets would have blown Paul’s brains into wet clumps. But her ’mancy was merely how Aliyah viewed the world, and she’d never witnessed anyone being shot for real.

  So when she saw her daddy getting shot, Aliyah instinctively gave him a health bar.

  That did not, however, stop her father’s blood from splattering across her face – that happened in videogames. Her scream burbled to a premature halt as she recognized the taste in her mouth.

  He was bleeding. The bullets had punched holes through his clothing.

  Daddy just died.

  Aliyah felt that cold, too-thin separation between what could have happened and what did happen.

  He’s alive no he’s alive

  No he died he was dead right now you saved him

  And all the fears she’d never allowed herself surged out – going into Daddy’s room at the Institute to see his empty bed, his fake foot’s charging stand forever empty – Aliyah threw up a force field to stop the next fusillade as Daddy tumbled to the ground, unconscious.

  You lost Daddy

  No he’s here he’s right here

  He got shot and died he died but you saved him

  And then the flux slammed into her like a plane crash, bad luck pouring into her looking for a worst fear to come true and they were still shooting and any bullet could kill her daddy any of them God Daddy was so fragile

  Get him to the counter. Get him behind the hard wood.

  That was the older Aliyah, the one that told her to talk to someone. Aliyah focused on those words. If she thought about anything else, the flux would surge in and make Daddy dead, so she focused on feeling Daddy’s ankles in her hands, one warm and bony and the other cold titanium, ignoring the bullets chipping away at the forcefield as the gunmen yelled in confusion.

  Why had she left Mr Payne’s badge back at home? Because she knew Mr Payne would be angry if she went to go see Daddy, and Mr Payne could track her with that wherever she went, and now she wished she had and

  The flux squeezed tighter, demanding all the good things she’d done get evened out.

  Don’t think about Daddy

  Bullets chipped off the hardwood. Plywood splinters stuck in her skin. She hated being a little girl, but she wasn’t the God of War now, she was someone with a dying Daddy who didn’t know what to do.

  “Someone help!” she yelled.

  Tires, screeching. Surprised shouts. A heavy thud and a bang as a car plowed through the crowd of people outside. Several men yelling in startled anguish as they were efficiently assassinated.

  Aliyah huddled up next to her father, pummeled by flux, trying not to think about the men, or Daddy, or anything. As long as she kept her mind blank, nothing would happen.

  Someone kicked in the back door, guns at the ready.

  Daddy’s work friends. The men who kissed when they thought no one was watching. Except they looked mean, now, the kind of men who even Rainbird feared.

  Don’t look at them, Aliyah thought. Don’t look at them, think of nothing…

  One of them – she wished she could remember his name – punched his boyfriend in the shoulder and jerked his chin towards Aliyah.

  “Holy shit,” one – K-Sean? – said. “It’s his daughter.”

  The other one – Quay-dash? – gave her a great relieved Disney Prince smile. “Oh my God, little one, I’m so glad we got to you in time.”

  “We gotta get her out of here.”

  She cradled her father’s head. “He’s hurt!”

  K-Sean nodded, as if to acknowledge how bad this was; Aliyah felt relief. She’d been too tense for tears – but now she saw how scared K-Sean and Quaydash were and that was proof how scary this had all been, and she let loose volcanic tears.

  Quaydash hesitated, reaching out to comfort her with one quivering hand while he squeezed his gun grip in the other, and Aliyah knew why: he was good with bullets, not so good with kids. Just like Valentine.

  She realized how foolish she’d been to hate mundanes. ’Mancy didn’t make you good or bad – it was love that made the difference. And these two men still cared about her even though she’d thrown their donuts in the sewer…

  She loved them. She loved them more than she ever believed she could love a mundane.

  The flux surged down that love, sensing its chance.

  “No!” she cried, yanking her hand back, but it was too late.

  K-Dash and Quaysean flinched – and then a stream of fire poured in through the doorway, shoving them back against the plywood, separating them, their dark hair going up like matchheads. Aliyah muffled her screams as their clothing burned off, their tribal tattoos blossoming to blacken their skin, revealing exposed muscle, then charred bone.

  They didn’t even look at her as they died. They brought their guns up to fire at their murderer, their last thoughts of protecting Aliyah – but the guns turned red-hot in their hands, exploded.

  When the flame ceased, the two men were ashen smears.

  “Aliyah!” Rainbird screamed. “You do not leave Mr Payne’s Institute without permission! What were you thinking? Oscar’s men could have shot you! You’re lucky I got here in time to save you!

  “I swear,” Rainbird muttered. “You’re as irresponsible as your father.”

  Her bad luck was Rainbird’s good luck. Her flux h
ad led him straight to her, just in time to kill K-Dash and Quaysean. Aliyah looked down at Daddy, wiped fake videogame blood off his skin.

  K-Dash and Quaysean had died so Daddy could live.

  Then she thought nothing at all as she drifted away.

  Forty-Three

  There Should Have Come a Cold Funeral

  The room was dimly lit, funereal; all Paul could see at first was the soft white curtains drawn around him.

  Then he noticed the people standing around him, gripping the rails of his hospital bed: Mrs Vinere, the masqueromancer, wearing a taut mask depicting concern. Juan the bookiemancer peered at Paul’s heart monitor, ticking off Paul’s vital signs in his notepad. Idena took the scrap paper Juan tore off his pad, folded the stained yellow paper into pure-white lilies.

  And at the foot of his bed, looking down with the gravity of a coroner, stood Mr Payne.

  “Once again, I have rescued you from your bad choices.”

  Payne didn’t sound angry, as he had in the past: his deep voice rang with sorrow. What had happened? Why was Paul here? Last he remembered, he had arrived at the laboratory.

  Paul moved to sit up; his clothes were stiff. He probed his shirt with his fingers, felt crusted blood ringed around holes in the fabric–

  Aliyah–

  He leapt out of bed – but the ’mancers moved as one, pressing him against the mattress, comforting him with their touch.

  “Your daughter is traumatized,” Payne said gravely. “She watched her father die. Oh, her ’mancy reversed death’s flow – she’s such a strong one, that girl – but she may as well have watched your brains hit the wall. Rainbird is looking after her.”

  “But who–”

  Payne closed his eyes, inhaling through his nostrils. “Your partner Oscar. For whatever reason, he decided you were a threat.”

  “No – he wouldn’t...”